The advent of portable integrated computing devices has caused a wide proliferation of cameras. These integrated computing devices commonly take the form of smartphones or tablets and typically include general purpose computers, cameras, sophisticated user interfaces including touch sensitive screens, and wireless communications abilities through WiFi, LTE, HSDPA and other cell-based or wireless technologies. The wide proliferation of these integrated devices provides opportunities to use the devices' capabilities to perform tasks that would otherwise require dedicated hardware and software. For example, as noted above, integrated devices such as smartphones and tablets typically have one or two embedded cameras. These cameras generally amount to lens/camera hardware modules that may be controlled through the general purpose computer using downloadable software (e.g., “Apps”) and a user interface including the touch-screen fixed buttons and touchless control such as voice control.
One opportunity for using the features of an integrated device is to capture and evaluate images. The resident camera allows the capture of one or more images and the general purpose computer provides processing power to perform analysis. In addition, any analysis that is preferred for a network service computer can be facilitated by simply transmitting the image data or other data to a service computer (e.g., a server, a website, or other network-accessible computer) by using the communications capabilities of the device.
These abilities of integrated devices allow for recreational, commercial and transactional uses of images and image analysis. For example, images may be captured and analyzed to decipher information from the images such as characters and symbols. The characters and symbols may be transmitted over a network for any useful purpose such as for use in a game, or a database, or as part of a transaction such as a credit card transaction. For these reasons and others, it is useful to enhance the abilities of these integrated devices and other devices for deciphering information from images.